New York Travel Stories

NEW YORK - A trip to New York City is never just a trip to New York City. You see things you never intended to see and the stories you tell when you return home are not the stories you planned to tell on the way there.

My wife Erin and I made a trip to the city not recently, taking along Ryan, an intern from Kansas City staying with us for the summer. It was his first trip to New York, which made me think back to my first time.

It was four years ago and New York was one of Erin and I's first ventures into a large city alone. I remember being half excited, half nervous for five days straight, it being the first trip where my wallet went from my back pocket to my front pocket while I was still at the airport.

I remember seeing Times Square, overwhelmed by the consumeristic cacophony dancing, flashing and buzzing to the point where it all becomes silent and you just can't stop looking up or snapping photos, trying to fill your camera with the enormity of the city. To me, Times Square is everything a first trip to New York is about. You feel like you're at the epicenter of the universe, and you are.

But on our way home on our recent trip, riding the MetroNorth line back into New Haven, we weren't discussing the Statue of Liberty and how much bigger or smaller Ryan thought it was going to be. We didn't talk about the view from atop of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the panoramic line of skyscrapers long enough to fill dozens of large cities. And we didn't talk about how this was the first time where "What is this, Grand Central Station?" was a legitimate question.

Rather, we talked about the things we never expected, like the father on the subway who had to nearly fight off the old man trying to feed a giant pretzel to his 3-year-old daughter.

"It's OK. No thanks. Please. No," the father said, his hand shielding the face of the child to prevent the man's hand from forcing the pretzel into her mouth. At one point the seemingly-normal-but-probably-nuts old man tried to reach around the father's head and feed the kid from behind. The old man just smiled the entire time, oblivious to the father's paternal sense of peril.

My concern grew when the force-feeding pretzel man ended his zealous attempt with the girl and sat next to me. I sat nervously for the remainder of the ride, knowing that a giant piece of pretzel could be stuffed into my face at any time if I let my guard down.

We rehashed our dinner, where we descended a flight of stairs in Chinatown to enter Wo Hop, a tiny, no-frills, Zagat-rated restaurant where we shared a table with a man whose crusty yellow eye infection produced a cloudy blue glaze over his left eyeball. As he answered his pesky cell phone with god-knows-why statements like "Fat Sal's Pizza!" I couldn't help but stare at the pale discolored ring around his unsightly chapped lips.

Before his shaky hand and unsure grip spilled a glass of water all over the table, he ended his last cell phone conversation "Can't a guy eat his last meal in peace?"

It's a question I normally would assume is asked sarcastically, but judging on how this guy was literally oozing with sickness, we all thought there was an outside chance he was serious.

Central Park was, of course, brought up on the ride home as well. Not for its thrilling example of city planning genius or its calming, oasis-in-the-city lake views or the solace of its intricate trail system. It was the nearly nude sunbathers, the deformed horns on the goat at the petting zoo and the handful of couples making out so vigorously that they approached NC-17 territory as we strolled past.

In the short term, it was the crazies that dominated our New York stories. It was the proselytizing subway rider who pleaded that you "make peace with your maker before you meet your undertaker." It wasn't the jutting dominance of the Empire State Building, the reality of the World Trade Center site or the bedlam of Times Square at night.

I'll never forget seeing and experiencing these landmarks for the first time. After six trips to New York, the first one is the one I remember most.

But after you've seen all the sights in New York, it's the craziness, the unexpected, the unplanned that forces you to return. After a few trips, you leave your camera at home and return with nothing but a handful of stories you never imagined telling.